The Cliffdwellers

[Dave Monroe]

Henry Fuller and Urban Literature
Fuller's Landmark Urban Novel The Cliffdwellers
(c) Sharon E.

Oct 21, 2007

Henry Blake Fuller's landmark novel, The Cliffdwellers, published in
1893, criticized Chicago urbanization.

Henry Blake Fuller's landmark urban novel, The Cliffdwellers, was
published just as the 1893 Columbian Exposition was coming to a close.
Native-born Chicagoan Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929) was riding a wave
of literary success from the publication of two European historical
romances based on his travels in France and Italy: The Chevallier of
Pensieri-Vani, in 1890 and the subsequent, but less popular, The
Chatelaine of La Trinite in 1892. In 1893, however, Fuller's writing
took a new course and the first of his Chicago novels was published.

Chicago Literary Renaissance
Chicago at the turn of the century was a tough city of urban squalor;
stink from the stockyards, exploited workers, unchecked poverty,
amorality and massive government corruption. It was unchecked
urbanization with its most disastrous results and making money had
become an art form. Fuller observed it all.

People flocked to Chicago from the farmlands seeking a new life and
writers also cast their critical, non-picturesque eye on the rural
areas from which they came. But, it was the "tales of the city" that
truly defined the first phase of the Chicago Literary Renaissance.
Frank Norris unmasked the Chicago Board of Trade and the economic
forces behind worldwide grain distribution in The Pit in 1903. Upton
Sinclair's 1906 gritty and disturbing expose on the exploitive
meatpacking industry and the Chicago Stockyards, The Jungle, was
shocking.

The Cliffdwellers: An Attack on Chicago
But, the first urban novel reflecting the social and economic trends
of Chicago was Fuller's The Cliff-dwellers published, to the chagrin
of the city, in the year the Columbian Exposition, or the Chicago
World's Fair as it is sometimes called. This book introduced Chicago
to the world in a negative light when it wanted to put its best foot
forward. That wasn't exactly what Fuller had in mind. Fuller's book
was an attack on the city. He had little to say in its favor, and it
fully illustrated his disgust of the commercialism that he felt had
eroded the progressive and romantic ideals of the Exposition.

Fuller applied the term "cliffdwellers" to the people who lived and
worked in the new skyscrapers that had begun being built after the
Great Fire of 1871. Fuller hated the buildings, to put it mildly.
Focusing on the residents of the fictitious Clifton Building (based on
the Monadnock Building built in 1891), Fuller describes the
businessmen and their families as they grasp for wealth, power and
status all within the confines of the building. For Fuller, the
skyscraper was a symbol of the ruthlessness that often characterized
business and modern life in the city. This was not the image that the
Chicago Columbian Fair Committee wanted projected to the visiting
world.

But, Fuller also had a strong belief in the artistic community that
was an off-shoot of the Fair.

Fuller chronicled the cities positive accomplishments in "The Upward
Movement in Chicago" published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1897. Fuller
characterized the fair as "a kind of post-graduate course for the men
at the head of Chicago's commercial and mercantile interest; it was
the city's intellectual and social annexation to the world at large."
Fuller carefully listed and acknowledged the city's cultural progress.

But, in the fall of 1893 when Fuller's critical eye focused on the
affect that urbanization had on the residents of Chicago, his novel
The Cliffdwellers crowned him father of urban literature.

http://literaryculture.suite101.com/article.cfm/henry_fuller_and_the_fair